Introduction

Motivation

The last years have witnessed the birth of new mediums for content publishing on the Internet. These individual-authoring mediums are called blogs or weblogs.

There are several points that make blogs very interesting for research. First, most of blogs content is person-oriented. This means that blogs are maintained by individuals that are willing to publish their thoughts and opinions. Besides, blogs are updated frequently with new entries. These entries discuss the current subjects that preoccupy not only the individuals but also the society. Moreover, the subjects in the blogs are not limited to certain topics. Since, the blog topics treat many issues from various fields of life. Additionally, the blogspace (the whole collection of all blogs) faces a bulky growth, since the latest figures of Technorati[1] shows that the volume of the blogspace has recently exceeded 59.1 million blogs with a growth of more than 70 thousands new blogs per day.

Given the popularity that blogs have acquired during the years, many research projects have been carried on blogs to study their nature and to highlight their interesting properties. However, we have noticed that few studies were conducted on non-English blogs, and especially blogs in Arabic.  

Research questions

The primary goal of this thesis is to elaborate a study on Arabic blogs in order to emphasize their nature and their characteristics. 

We focus on particular questions to investigate the characteristics of Arabic blogs, and we categorize these questions into the following topics:

• Questions aimed to study the nature of the Arabic blogs, for example :
  
  
  • What languages exist in Arabic blogs?
  • What issues are treated in Arabic blogs?
    
    
• Questions that concentrate on the influence of blogs on public opinion and mass media such as:
  
  
  • What impact do Arabic blogs have on media and society?

• Questions that address the effects of world events on Arabic blogspace (the collection of all Arabic blogs), for instance:
  
  
  • What kind of reaction does real ground in the Arabic blogspace?

In order to answer these questions, we will review the research work performed on blogs. Particularly, we will investigate previous work that has dealt appropriately with similar research questions.

Further, we will elaborate a study to characterize the Arabic blogspace. We believe that it is extremely hard to acquire data from the whole Arabic blogspace, since the Arabic blogs are sparsely distributed in the blogspace. However, we will adopt an approach to provide the experiments with an appropriate amount of blog data.

Our approach is based on designing a system that is able to collect and monitor data from thousands of Arabic blogs. This data is processed, structured and used to build an Arabic blogs dataset.

The Arabic blogs dataset will provide us with relevant blog data which can be used to make measurements and conduct experiments. The results of these experiments will enable us to draw conclusions about the characteristics of the Arabic blogspace.